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Chapter 2, ““And Then We Wept”: Coral Death on Record,” documents the despair side of the pendulum as it contemplates the existing modes and technologies for recording coral bleaching and death. Here, the trajectory is typically of devastation and gloom, as the numbers are depressing at best. Much of the chapter focuses on the third global bleaching event at the Great Barrier Reef, documenting how scientists have both recorded and narrated this event to themselves and to the general public. I examine the role of monitoring in particular, considering whether enhancing scientific knowledge about corals through monitoring is an act of hope, in that it supports conservation action, or one of despair, as it stifles such action and masks the resulting inaction with more and more monitoring. Finally, the chapter shows that even in the world of numbers and maps, “bright spots” and optimistic indexes still rear their more hopeful heads.

Many events in global tectonics and high latitude climate had significant effects on Cenozoic climate evolution. This chapter explores three revolutions in climate research that have dramatically altered our perception of global and African climate. First, the discovery that large magnitude climate events occurred abruptly, sometimes in as little as decades, has prompted high-resolution paleoclimate reconstructions and new conceptions of climate dynamics. Second, recent climate studies have revealed significant tropical climate variability. Modern observational climate data have indicated that the largest mode of global interannual climate variability is the El Niño Southern Oscillation in the tropical Pacific. Revised estimates of tropical sea surface temperatures during global cool and warm events have revealed significant tropical sensitivity to global climate change. Third, the role of the tropics in global climate change has been reconceptualized. This chapter also discusses the modern climate of Africa, abrupt events in the Paleocene, Oligocene Antarctic glaciation and Southern African climate, mid-Miocene climate change in Africa, plio-Pleistocene environmental change, cool and dry conditions during the Last Glacial Maximum, and Holocene climate.

This chapter presents examples of variational data assimilation in coastal oceanography using the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS). Realizing that satellite data is the only source of information in real time in most parts of the world ocean, the Ocean Modeling Group at Rutgers University has developed methodologies to exploit the information content in remotely sensed observations. This chapter evaluates the extent to which incremental, strong constraint, four-dimensional variational data assimilation (IS4DVAR) can improve prediction of mesoscale variability using ROMS. Examples of two applications of IS4DVAR in two very different dynamical regimes are presented: the East Australia Current (EAC) and the Middle Atlantic Bight (MAB). The two main sources of satellite information, namely sea surface temperature (SST) and sea surface height anomaly (SSHA), are found to be complementary, and therefore both need to be assimilated in order to approximate the three-dimensional structure of the ocean.